Thursday, April 10, 2008

Elton vs. Orwell: Elton John gave a fundraising concert for Hillary and claims that all the misogynists in America might be hindering her bid for the White House. Getting lectured by a guy who dresses like him might turn this country homophobic, but I'll go with another Brit, George Orwell, who said that the U.S. is a female-dominated country.

Here's an example of what he meant: The World Values Survey asked people in 43 countries if a woman needs a child in order to be fulfilled. Only Finland and the Netherlands had lower numbers than the United States.

7 comments:

You appear to imply that the US answer to the WVS question is wrong, but you also appear to imply that a "female-dominated country" is a country where children and motherhood are not valued - which therefore implies you believe the US answer to the WVS question is right.

jm: My point is that America is bad, but not bad like Elton John thinks. He thinks we hate women, but the truth is that elite women have a lot of influence here. Unfortunately that influence is often bad. Prohibition is one historical example; contemporary feminism's message that a career for a woman is key to her personal fulfillment is another.

Well, I knew from your tone that you were implying that female power was bad, but I didn't see how your two premises added up to that conclusion - they appeared to contradict each other. If premise A was wrong (that is if children are essential to female happiness) then premise B would likely not be correct (that is female power would more likely result in attitudes affirming this viewpoint).

That is, if children were necessary for female psychological happiness, that would seem to imply that a society with more female power would be more pro-natal, not less, since groups generally translate their political power into the advancement of their own interests.

So the fact that female power leads to more anti-natal viewpoints suggests the American view is correct: children are not essential to female happiness.

In fact, I'd like to extend that: the evidence shows having children, on average, decreases total for both men and women. So having children is generally good for society but generally bad for the individual. This is because personal happiness is most reliably built by spending one's prime years improving one's economic self-sufficiency.

So even women with higher biological predispositions to want children end up happier if they wait later in life to have them, after they have have ensured, among other things, that they can take care of themselves and their offspring. (being able to fully take care of one's self is superior to the vulnerable role of economic dependency on another person)

There's probably a distinction between high-T and low-T women here. High-T women probably want kids less. My suspicion is that the US, despite its general religious conservatism compared to Europe, favors money a lot more, so we want women to make money. Who ever said capitalism and family values went together?

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"The creation myth was the essential bond that held the tribe together. It provided its believers with a unique identity, commanded their fidelity, strengthened order, vouchsafed law, encouraged valor and sacrifice, and offered meaning to the cycles of life and death. No tribe could survive long without the meaning of its existence defined by a creation story. The option was to weaken, dissolve, and die." ~ E.O. Wilson